Richard Zink’s desire to win strategy board games like Axis and Allies and Fortress America in college got him started on the path to a career in statistics. “I wanted to better understand the rules of probability to make me a better player,” recalled Zink, a Principal Research Statistician Developer in [...]

Annie Dudley Zangi was applying statistical methods to her science projects in primary school before she even knew about statistics. It just came naturally to her, and so did the experiments she conducted at her father's strawberry farm before she learned about split-plot designs. Read this full profile to learn [...]

I am one of those rare people that enjoys process; not rigid process and military-like discipline, but order. Wasted effort drives me insane. I’ve been on projects all through my career where I feel like the project teams are constantly reinventing the wheel, because nobody bothered to capture any documentation [...]

I have recently discovered “mind mapping.” Mind mapping is not a new concept, but since I (re)learned it, I’ve found it to be an excellent tool for analyzing business problems and processes. I thought you might find it interesting too! Here’s an example: The other day, I was thinking about [...]

The SAS office in New York City has one of the best views in the city. Sitting on the 47th floor of a skyscraper on 7th Avenue, the Executive Briefing Room overlooks Central Park and it has a highly distracting view – especially on such a nice sunny day. What [...]

Remember the old Reese’s peanut butter cup advertisement? Two people are walking down the street – one eating peanut butter, the other chocolate – they run into each other and the chocolate and the peanut butter get mixed up. They sample the new concoction and marvel at the wonderful mixture [...]

If you're like most large organizations, you've got a bunch of business intelligence and analytic applications at your fingertips. In my prior organization, a large insurance company, I believe the magic number of tools that the organization had to support was north of 40. No kidding. Now, this is a [...]

A professional acquaintance and an expert in statistics once told me that if you don't understand how to perform the process of analytics through programming - the creation of the data flow, the transformation of the variables and the development of the statistical procedure - then you had no business [...]

I'm listening to Jon Weisz, marketing director for JMP, talk about data-driven story telling. He's explaining the differences between statistics and data visualization. Statistics are often used to confirm a hypothesis, he says. Data visualization is used for exploration. Jon's defining models as approximations: "We're attempting to experiment and determine [...]

I'm posting this live from the Midwest SAS User's Group (MWSUG) in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Attendees are eating dinner, and we're about to hear John Sall, Executive Vice President of SAS, talk about the history of the company he co-founded along with Jim Goodnight, Tony Barr and Jen Helwig in [...]